Project Description

Gorman’s

Our client, Gorman’s Home Furnishings & Interior Design, took on a titanic project in 2014: designing and furnishing three multimillion-dollar homes that would become part of Homearama 2014.

In the heyday of the residential construction boom, Homearama was a highly anticipated annual event at which developers, builders, architects and designers could put their most creative ideas on display. But the much-loved event had been on hiatus since the early days of the Great Recession. When the event returned in 2014, Gorman’s agreed to not only provide interior design services for three of the show homes but to also become Homearama’s presenting sponsor.

The client had been focused on, and busy with, the design work for the more than 25,0000-square-feet of luxury homes at the development site. Because of that, their social media accounts had stagnated. Our plan needed to be aggressive.

First, we added boards to Gorman’s Pinterest pages featuring each of the three homes. We began posting images there a month before the event, even before any of the design work could be revealed. We only hinted at color palettes and design styles.

Next, we created Gorman’s Instagram account and aggressively sought new followers by capitalizing on the agency’s population of social media connections, as well as by seeking out and engaging with similar lifestyle businesses in the metro area.

Finally, we launched paid social media campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. We consistently used the unique hashtag #Homearama2014, as well as a small number of keywords to improve SEO.

These measures were in concert with media outreach efforts, which were spectacularly successful.

At the culmination of our eight-week project, we had increased the number of Gorman’s Facebook followers by 459 new page likes, or eight percent. In addition, we had increased the total reach from an average of 200 to 350 to thousands. On the most active day during the project, our paid reach was 2,169, and our organic post reach was 1,671.

On Pinterest, we doubled the number of followers and, within days, gained nearly 100 followers on Instagram.

At the end of the project, we were able to hand off to the client the newly created accounts, as well as the existing accounts that had picked up hundreds more followers.

Leadership at Gorman’s said they were pleasantly surprised by how much social media expanded their online reach when the plan was integrated into their advertising and public relations and media relations plan. Though they would have received excellent earned media, they would not have been able to quickly establish such a vast web presence without adding social media to their marketing efforts.

We are innovative.
We are agile.
We are entrepreneurial.For more than 25 years, suburban Detroit-based Marx Layne & Company has provided outstanding, results-oriented communications counsel to a broad spectrum of clients in the business, government and non-profit sectors.